The docking clamps bit into Neptune's arcology, and the Eidolon Spire jolted with a metallic groan. For a second, everyone on the bridge held their breath, if the clamps phased out mid-lock, they'd drift into a district already breaking apart.
They held. Barely.
"Dock secured," Seris said, though her tone betrayed no comfort. "But I wouldn't trust this connection to last five minutes."
Kaelen rose. "We don't have five. Move."
The ramp dropped, and the crew entered a city unravelling.
Buildings leaned at wrong angles, glass towers bent like softened wax. Streets twisted back on themselves, some ending in blank walls where shops had once stood. People ran, their bodies glitching at the edges, an arm lagging behind, a leg flickering, as though parts of them had been forgotten by reality itself.
Children screamed for parents who vanished between one step and the next. Traders clutched market stalls that stuttered between existing and not, their wares dissolving in pulses of light.
It felt like walking inside a collapsing dream.
Seris swept her visor. "Cohesion under thirty percent. Local fabric degrading faster than I can stabilize."
Kaelen pressed fingers against his temple. The Cortex surged with threads, drawing out maps of crumbling possibility. He saw which streets would fold first, which towers would vanish, which lives had seconds left.
And he moved.
"District hub X-14. Stabilizers there. Go."
Ryn's voice cut through the chaos, his tone a perfect monotone threaded with harmonics from the Titans above.
"Trajectory viable. Probability drift: severe. Risk: critical."
His inhuman calm grated against the panic in the streets, but it anchored the crew.
They sprinted through corridors that warped mid-stride. Twice they nearly fell into hollows where the floor folded away. Lyra fired stabilizer darts into the walls, buying them moments of solidity, while Seris pulled civilians back from collapsing edges.
Then the shadows shifted.
The Forge arrived.
It did not descend like a ship or emerge like an army. It bled into being, dark mist spilling out of ruptured buildings, congealing into form.
First a hand, then a torso. Then glassy limbs bent at wrong joints, surfaces reflecting faces that weren't there. The reflections weren't random: they were possible versions of the people in the street, dead, older, screaming, smiling. Futures, pasts, drafts.
It loomed until it filled the plaza. A cathedral of broken reflections, bending light and sound into static.
A scream tore from the crowd. Someone ran. The Forge's head tilted, not a face, but a curve of mirrored plates, and the runner was rewritten mid-stride, replaced with a version of themselves that had never grown old. A child's body crumpled where an adult had stood.
Lyra swore, raising her rifle. "That's not editing anymore. That's hunting."
Kaelen's voice was flat, cold. "It learns."
He pulled a stabilizer array from his pack, slammed it into the ground. The device thrummed, throwing out a resonance field. For a heartbeat, the plaza steadied. Buildings snapped back into alignment, civilians blurred into coherence.
The Forge reeled, its mirrored plates warping. It hated resistance.
Then it split into three forms at once.
One surged forward with limbs like blades. Another dissolved into crawling shards that scaled the walls. The third simply bent space itself, dragging streets inward like a spiral.
From orbit, the Titans stirred.
Harmonic pulses rippled through the atmosphere, low, seismic notes only Ryn translated.
"Directive: defend anchor. Titans reinforce perimeter. Human fulcrum, hold the breach."
Their voices resonated through him, their tones carrying judgment. The Titans did not see Neptune as streets and markets. They saw it as a node in a war map of stars and fractures. And Kaelen, one human among billions, was their chosen anchor.
On the ground, the fight turned vicious.
Seris cut down shards with precise bursts of plasma. Lyra drove a squad of militia into formation, forcing panicked civilians toward the stabilizer field. Ryn stood unflinching, his body flickering with Titan harmonics as he channeled instructions directly from above.
Kaelen faced the Forge itself.
His Cortex flared, possibilities branching like shattered glass. He saw the paths: the plaza collapsing into nothing, Seris rewritten into a stranger, Lyra's militia firing on civilians by mistake. He also saw how to change it.
He picked one thread. Forced it to collapse.
The Forge lunged, its blade-arm tearing down toward him, and instead struck a wall of paradox he forced into being, a contradiction woven by the Disruptor. The blade froze mid-air, its own reflection turning against it, slicing itself apart in a shower of mirrored fragments.
The plaza shook with the impact. People screamed. The Forge reformed, massive again, its body stretching across rooftops.
Kaelen's knees buckled from the strain. The Cortex drained him with every collapse. His pulse hammered, vision dimming at the edges.
And still the Forge advanced.
Above, a Titan sent another harmonic, this one deeper, sharper, enough to rattle bone. The Forge faltered, but only for a moment.
Ryn translated in his unblinking tone: "Titan consensus: resistance effective. But Forge adapts. If pressed further, escalation certain."
Kaelen wiped blood from his temple, eyes locked on the towering nightmare. His voice was hoarse but unwavering.
"Then we don't give it time to adapt."
He stepped forward.
The Forge did not retreat when Kaelen shattered its blade-arm.
Instead, it paused.
Its fractured body, shards of glass, insectile limbs, warped mirrors, slid inward. Piece by piece, the reflections aligned.
For the first time, its silhouette hinted at something almost… humanoid. Shoulders where there had been none. A torso narrowing into symmetry. Limbs folding into something disturbingly familiar.
Not fully human, not yet. But enough for the watching civilians to scream louder. Enough for Kaelen to feel ice coil in his chest.
"It's copying," Lyra muttered. "Us. It's learning form."
"No," Kaelen whispered. His Cortex pulsed painfully, an overclocked furnace behind his eyes. He saw threads unraveling, millions of potential versions of the Forge fracturing outward. Some were beasts, some were storms, but more and more of them, almost half, were human shapes.
"It's deciding."
Ryn's head tilted, harmonics vibrating through his frame. His voice was steady,
"Council consensus: Forge adaptation exceeds projected limits. Convergence approaching. Pattern suggests mimicry of fulcrum species."
Seris spat, firing bursts into crawling shards. "Translation: it's becoming us."
Above, the Titans stirred again. Their harmonic pulses thundered through the skies, shaking the collapsing towers. In their perception, Kaelen felt like they weren't just watching the Forge… they were measuring him.
As if this evolution was tied not only to the Forge, but to him.
Kaelen staggered as his Cortex surged. Threads of possibility flared too fast, too dense. His skull felt ready to split open. He could see everything, a thousand micro-decisions of the militia around him, the way Seris's rifle would jam three seconds from now unless she shifted her grip, the precise angle of the collapsing building that would crush two civilians in twenty-one seconds.
It was too much. His vision fractured, overlaying layers of possibilities like stacked glass. His brain screamed, but something in the Cortex was adapting. Expanding.
A voice, not his own, rippled through his thoughts, cold and clinical.
[Adaptive calculation threshold exceeded. Cortex lattice restructuring.]
Kaelen gasped. "It's… changing me."
The Forge lunged again, now with a vaguely human-shaped arm, jagged but recognizable as a fist. It slammed down where Kaelen had been standing.
But Kaelen didn't dodge. His body moved before he decided, guided by threads collapsing faster than thought. He shifted just enough for the blow to miss by millimeters, then pivoted into a counter, firing a stabilizer spike directly into the Forge's reflective chest.
The blast tore a hole. Shards fell away like broken glass, showing hollow light beneath. But already, the pieces swarmed back together, knitting into a torso that looked even more human than before.
From orbit, a Titan's harmonic cut through the chaos, so low the buildings quivered, so deep it rattled Kaelen's teeth. Ryn translated:
"Council observation: both fulcrum and adversary undergoing synchronized evolution. Probability node destabilizing."
Lyra shouted over the din: "They mean you're tied to it, Kaelen! The more it changes, the more you change!"
Kaelen's eyes burned. For a heartbeat, the reflections on the Forge's chest flickered, and one of them was him.
His own face, staring back.
Kaelen clenched his jaw, forcing the Cortex to focus. His vision blurred into threads again. One path showed him falling, consumed by the overload. Another showed him stabilizing, if he accepted the pain, let the lattice remake itself.
For the first time, the Cortex wasn't just a tool. It was alive.
"Then I evolve faster," he whispered.
Then, he launched forward.